Abstract

This article is driven by death. Thematically, death serves as a figure in the central creative works I discuss: Samuel R. Delany's sword-and-sorcery novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, one of the first novels to deal directly with the AIDS pandemic,1 and Lou Reed's songs, especially the proto-punk "Heroin" and the queer soul song "Coney Island Baby." Meanwhile, the argument's methodology also concerns death. As many theorists and critics have discussed,2 the field of queer studies has seen, for at least the past few decades, a general division between a methodology that isolates queerness as a singularly significant figure of identity and a more intersectional queer studies that figures sexuality within a...